Measuring extractive institutions: colonial trade and price gaps in French Africa
利用新档案数据，通过比较法国垄断贸易公司支付给非洲生产者的价格与假设竞争市场下的价格，估算殖民榨取程度，发现非洲价格仅为竞争价格的很小一部分，每年损失近2%的GDP。
Abstract Colonial extractive institutions are often blamed for current African underdevelopment. Yet, since colonial extraction is hard to quantify, the magnitude of this phenomenon remains unclear. In this paper, I use new archival data to estimate colonial extraction through trade, measured as the gap between prices that the monopsonistic French trading companies paid to African producers and prices that should have been paid in a counterfactual competitive market. The results show that African prices were only a small fraction of competitive prices, implying an annual loss of almost 2 percent of GDP during colonial rule.